Moss Adams, an accounting firm owned by Baker Tilly, has spun off its Moss Adams Wealth Advisors unit to form Threadline Wealth, an independent RIA launching with funding from private equity firm Cynosure Group and nearly $6 billion in assets under management.
Threadline Wealth CEO Justin Fisher spent 19 years with Moss Adams, which merged last year with Baker Tilly to form the sixth-largest advisory CPA firm in the U.S, per the deal’s announcement. Threadline has bases in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, catering in large part to high-net-worth clients who are Silicon Valley technology executives.
“We're a really specialized boutique wealth management firm that focuses on business owners going through transitions and transactions, executives that have complex balance sheets,” Fisher told InvestmentNews. “The majority of our clients and families we work with have complex balance sheets navigating a lot of financial complexity. So they're really looking for a wealth management firm that is delivering great investment, financial planning, wealth management advice, but also is super focused on collaborating with the accounting community.”
Threadline launches with about 60 employees, about half of whom are advisors. The firm’s assets for the past two decades under Moss Adams and Baker Tilly have been driven entirely by organic growth, but Fisher expects Threadline to enter inorganic growth through M&A.
“We will be looking actively for M&A inorganic growth throughout time, targets would be advisors and teams that help us get better, not get bigger,” said Fisher. “I wouldn't be surprised if some of those team members came from folks that are in the accounting and wealth communities, a lot of us kind of like to serve clients in similar ways.”
Other wealth management firms backed by The Cynosure Group include hybrid RIA Steward Partners and Savant Wealth, an RIA overseeing about $44 billion in client assets. Threadline’s RIA spinoff away from its accounting parent mirrors that of SSC CPAs + Advisors, which sold its wealth management arm SSC Wealth to Merit Financial Advisors in January.
“From a regulatory standpoint, we wanted to remove some of the frictions that you have with independence with an accounting firm and the investments that we do from an RIA standpoint,” Fisher said of Threadline’s decision to spin-off as an RIA.
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